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Washington has always been something of a wonderland,
where enemies are sometimes regarded as allies, and Alice is
often the very model of a major modern president.

The contretemps this week
over a briefing at the Pentagon, by
an outside analyst who described
Saudi Arabia, as any alert
schoolboy might, as an enemy of
the United States illustrates just
how fantastical intelligent men must
sometimes make themselves
appear to be.

The briefer, Laurent Muraweic,
in remarks to the Defense Policy
Board Advisory Committee, made
the perfectly obvious point that the
Saudi contribution to the West's war against terror consists
mainly of funding terrorists, frustrating American attempts to
hunt down Saudi killers, financing the spread of Islamist
hatred and bigotry throughout the world, and sending out
"missionaries" to incinerate Americans 3,000 at a time. If any
country fits George W.'s description of a terrorist nation -
those who harbor terrorists are terrorists themselves - it's
Saudi Arabia.

When The Washington Post found someone who heard
the Muraweic remarks and put them on Page One,
obsequious squeaks and squawks rent the air from Foggy
Bottom to Riyadh. Colin Powell, whose assignment as
secretary of state is to massage the flaccid egos of brain-dead
Euro-weenies and tyrants we insist on calling our friends,
quickly called Crown Prince Abdullah, the presiding royal, to
tell him that Americans do, too, love him. For his part, the
prince returned a lover's warning: If George W. goes through
with his oft-stated threat to rid the world of Saddam Hussein,
he will do it without any help from Saudi Arabia.

No surprise there. But here's the usually straight-talking
Don Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, on Saudi Arabia:
"There was some outsider came into the department, gave a
briefing, left, and the impression is left that there is some sort
of a policy decision on the part of the government, or that
there's a view that that's the dominant opinion.

"And of course Saudi Arabia is like any other country; it
has a broad spectrum of activities and things, some of which,
obviously, just like our country, that we agree with and some
we may not."

Rarely, if ever, has the straight-shooting Mr. Rumsfeld
choked on such argle-bargle. Cabinet ministers, like the
presidents they serve, sometimes have to tell whoppers and
stretchers, but Mr. Rumsfeld deserves a pass for the rest of
his term after having to spin this one. Saudi Arabia is
definitely not like any other country, and praise be to Allah
that it is not. We successfully fought off Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan at one and the same time, but more than one
Saudi Arabia might be more enemies than we could handle. If
there was ever a place without "a broad spectrum of activities
and things," or even a narrow spectrum of such, it's Saudi
Arabia, where the only entertainments are tedious lectures at
the mosque on the proper ways to kill infidels, beheadings in
the town square and speculations about what might be under
those burkas. Saudi Arabia is definitely not "obviously, just
like our country," and this time let us thank God. There's very
little we - and this surely includes Don Rumsfeld - "agree
with," and an awful lot that we do not. (How do we count the
ways?)

What the United States do hold in common with the
6,000 Saudi princes (who as authentic royalty rank right up
there with the Queen of the Irish Potato Festival of the
Ozarks) is a commercial interest. We buy their oil and they
buy our weapons (and when they come to visit they buy our
booze and our ham sandwiches). Saudi Arabia is, as Mr.
Rumsfeld further said, "a country where we have a lot of
forces located," but as the crown prince reminds us, these
forces are not to be used to protect American interests. They
were useful a decade ago when the princes were more
terrified than Saudi princes usually are, and were counting on
American, mostly Christian, blood to save them from the
wrath of Saddam Hussein, which Saudi, all-Muslim, blood
could not do. They were so grateful, in fact, that when
President Bush the elder wanted to sit down with his troops
for Thanksgiving dinner he was told that he couldn't say grace
because that would be praying to the G-d of Christians and
Jews. The elder Mr. Bush, who sometimes suffers an excess
of good manners, should have led his troops in a rousing
chorus of "Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound" and left a
few Gideon Bibles for the princes, but instead flew out to the
USS Nassau for supper with the sailors.

You can't expect presidents and Cabinet ministers to say
these things, as obvious as they are, and it is true that over the
years the interests of the United States and the House of
Saud - it's not really a nation as we understand the term -
have coincided on enough occasions to make it worthwhile to
maintain the fiction of friendship. But with the Islamist assault
on the West, the contradictions in the relationship have begun
to outweigh advantages. The Saudi princes may soon have to
choose whether they want "friendship," such as it is, with the
United States, or to take their chances elsewhere. If he really
means to eliminate Saddam Hussein, George W. can get
along without the Saudis very well. Which is a good thing,
because that's how it has to be. We have the word of a
prince.